


Cursed Star

by nsmorig



Series: So Says The Bullet: [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Non-Consensual Body Modification, Angst, Anticapitalist Themes, Canonical Child Abuse, Complicated Relationships, Enemies to Lovers, Epistolary Elements, Eventual Happy Ending, Families of Choice, Force Shenanigans (Star Wars), Force-Sensitive CC-2224 | Cody, Grief/Mourning, Haunted Places, Horror, M/M, Mythology - Freeform, Non-Linear Narrative, Political Themes, Sith Alchemy (Star Wars), Sith CC-2224 | Cody, Slow Burn, What Even Are The Sith Anyway?, Worldbuilding, disregard of canon, in-universe media, more OCs than you can shake a stick at - Freeform, warnings subject to change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-23
Packaged: 2021-03-25 13:28:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30089796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nsmorig/pseuds/nsmorig
Summary: There are two ways to loose yourself. The first is to have a goal so big that it does the thinking for you; the second is to have no reason why you're doing what you're doing. Cody's had a lot of the first kind of lost. He thinks it's fitting that he has a little of the second, now.
Relationships: Boba Fett & Darth Maul, CC-2224 | Cody & Boba Fett, CC-2224 | Cody & CT-7567 | Rex, CC-2224 | Cody & Original Characters, CC-2224 | Cody & Other Clones, CC-2224 | Cody/Mace Windu, Depa Billaba & Mace Windu
Series: So Says The Bullet: [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2171682
Comments: 23
Kudos: 30





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So you know how in canon the Sith are basically irredeemable fascists and the dark side just makes you a massive dick? This is kind of me going 'what if it weren't, though?' Other things that aren't portrayed in any kind of canon-accurate way include the planets Dromund Kaas and Hurrikaine, and also the timeline. The timeline doesn't exist, this is the clone wars.
> 
> This is a direct sequel to False Dichotomy, the first fic in this series, and will make precisely zero sense without reading that first, unfortunately.
> 
> Unlike False Dichotomy, I don't have the majority of this written yet. Some, yes, but not all, so updates will be a lot slower.
> 
> The warnings here are for:  
> A level of violence that is consistent, I believe, with the source material, but everything is nastier in text form. This is what the M rating is for.  
> Canonical child abuse, ie. the treatment of Boba by Aurra Sing and some of the other people in his life. This will be resolved.  
> The aftermath of the non-consensual body modification and associated body horror that goes on in False Dichotomy.
> 
> Because the plot is currently mutable, I expect those warnings to change or expand as the chapter count goes up.

This close to the forest floor, where the light doesn't reach, the plant life is thin and gloom-adapted. Things die up in the canopy, birds, climbing beasts, and then they fall, and are eaten slowly by the crawling things and the thick black fungus, and this sustains the life that light doesn't.

Either things die or things get lost. He knows there are things following him the way that scavengers do; it's a hunting pattern that feels familiar, though he's never had to feed himself that way. But he's not lost. There is a city ahead, teeming in his awareness like a hive of insects, and he walks towards it, always towards.

He knows how to march. He can march all day and all night, if he has to, weighed down with armour and bruised all the way down to his bones; he's done it before.

He doesn't have to look ahead to know where he's going. The map is clear in his head; he tells the Force where he's going and it tells him how to get there, even if he has to _make_ it yield up the information, shove and command until it falls into line. Where to set his feet to walk silently. Where fallen trunks block the path, where rivers turn the earth impassible.

He looks up instead. The stars are bright, now; they'll fade as he gets closer, light pollution turning the black to grey and crowding out the pinpricks of light. He almost wants to delay just so he can watch it longer. It doesn't feel like looking up, it feels like looking down.

He always liked the oceans on Kamino. Maybe once a year, the storms had gone quiet, really silent, and the surface had stilled for just a little while, and it had been like this. Like the black is a surface, and the stars are below it, deep, fathoms deep, their image reaching him warped. Like if he lets himself go he'll fall towards them. And, like the deep oceans, there are things, he knows, in the dark—a billion things he's never seen, some of them living and some of them not, waiting between the stars. Not waiting for _him._ But waiting.

On campaign, time to stargaze is rare. There is always an objective. Always a goal. Something towards. So now he's going towards the city, and afterwards he'll choose something else to be towards. Maybe he'll choose a star. Maybe a planet with oceans.

* * *

It takes twenty minutes, after he's submitted his after-action report, for his comm to start to wail.

In the course of his duties, Mace has seen an astonishing number of incomprehensible, incomplete or downright deceptive mission reports. This is not one of them. He does not hide information that may be useful to the war effort, even if it is, currently, causing him significant irritation and adversely affecting his working relationship with High Command.

He does, however, instruct the terminal to delay the incoming call from High Command, and instead picks up the transmission from Obi-wan.

The tiny blue hologram is not good at conveying expression, the features of the face blurred, but Mace can guess. He waits.

"It's true, isn't it?" he says, because he is aware of Mace's policy concerning after-action reports, and has in fact taken the brunt of it several times.

Mace nods. He hasn't called to question the veracity of it—he suspects he just didn't know what else to do.

"He was _dead,"_ Obi-wan says, his hands curled together in front of his mouth. By the flicker of the hologram, he's taking the call in his quarters, nightshift wherever he is, or maybe morning—and he'd still been reading the reports as soon as they came in. There is a very characteristic sort of raggedness to his voice, one he's trying to hide. Mace has heard it several times, as the war rumbles on like a freighter train on its tracks.

"Presumed," he says, and attempts gentleness. Speaks quietly, attempts to leave no room for misunderstanding, lets his concern bleed into the Force even though it can't reach through the transmission; he has never been able to guess how effective it is, if any of it shows on his face. "The identification was not confirmed," he says. "It may not be as clear as the report, by necessity, makes it sound."

"But it looked like him?"

He doesn't make the obvious joke, just nods. "Yes," he says. "But scars can be copied. I didn't know him well, but he was different, in the Force."

That could be any number of things. People change in the Force from one moment to the next—this is what distinguishes them from, for example, rocks—and training, especially in the Dark, will cause permanent changes. He still remembers how the impact of Depa's presence had gone from unsure to steady, solid, as she'd grown, and hardened further as she'd learned Vaapad, and how it had gone shaky again, like quicksand foundations. But Commander Cody, as he remembered him, had had a shape in the Force rather like what Mace remembers of what he used to be: blunt, reliable, but unremarkable. Easy to overlook. Nothing like the Sith's, which was also blunt, in the manner of an instrument.

"He's going to be alright," Obi-wan says, with perfect faith, perhaps too perfect; a promise, but not one to Mace. "We'll find him, and help him."

He tries to formulate a response—something reasoned and cautious that doesn't sound like an attack, something that communicates the necessity of care, prudence, and expresses how little he wants Obi-wan to hurt himself trying to help his friend, how truly rare it is that someone lost to the Dark can be brought back—but it all sounds hypocritical, so he only manages to say "Be careful," before the terminal lights up again with an urgent message from the Chancellor.

* * *

Cody forgets that you have to pay for things. He generally doesn't. It's very embarrassing. He walks into a starport and gets halfway through requesting they issue him a 'craft pursuant to Military Requisitions Policy 12A, Paragraph Four, before he remembers that that isn't how any of this works, stops mid-sentence, and walks right back out again.

Mortifying.

Money is difficult. He's never, obviously, had much of the stuff, but he's also never not known when the next shipment of pre-prepared rations is coming in, even if the answer is 'later than you'd like.' There is a difference, he learns, between not having any money and not having any money.

There is also difference between having a goal and having a task. He learns he does not like work for money. It feels like it cheapens his effort. It feels hollow, and it grinds up inside of him even more than the loneliness. Makes him angry.

He has spent a long time selling his principles. He will not do it any more. He learns to say, _I will not do this._ He will not hurt people for money, he will not fix the shrapnel gun, he will not stand lookout, he will not sell the armour. He learns to back it up with both his fists and his hunger.

Things grow increasingly desperate, the longer he stays in one place, because he stands out, and that's _without_ him taking his helmet off. Someday soon someone will come for him, and he suspects he will not be let go again.

* * *

Walk through the dust. Don't wander; wandering is aimless, walking just to walk, and Cody has an aim. He always has an aim, though it changes all the time. He walks and he goes seeking, seeking music or books or food or quiet or nice dreams or money, always money. These are hollow aims, sometimes, and sometimes they take up the whole world. Base, he thinks. Basic, fundamental, simple, complicated. Empty, or maybe just open.

Walk through the dust. Drag. Drag yourself, if walking isn't enough. Push. Push all the time, though the door doesn't move; the sawdust, the sloughings-off of the timber industry, piles up everywhere, in front of your boots, in the hollows between bricks in the road. This whole place would go up like magnesium in water if someone dropped a match. Still, at least it's soft to sleep on, if you don't mind the splinters.

Everyone else is doing the same.

He wants to feel things. He wants to feel lots of things, all at once, and he does, and then he's finished and he's lying on his back on a roof and he doesn't quite know to claw his mind back from where the spinning universe is holding onto it, feeling the heartbeats of all the people on this street all at once. He spends hours at a time asking why, why, why? Why is he doing this? Why did he do this? Why did he do that?

A singer croons low in the bar down the block from his rooftop, the sound echoing through the corrugated iron of the roofs and amplified, turned tinny, by his helmet speakers. _The love's not dead,_ she sings. _It's only gone away._

_Same thing,_ he thinks. Do the people here live like this all the time? Shuddering on the inside, down to the last numb nerve exposed, sinking down into the open sky all night and going to work in the morning, filled up with hunger and nothing else? No reasons?

Music. He likes music. But he wishes the singer would play something proper, with the walking cadences, like they used to all sing together to the beat of the gauntlet and the thigh-plates...

He lies on the roof. The stars. The spinning universe, the smear of the galaxy and the stars that are even further away than that. He lies on the roof and it's almost morning and he didn't, he didn't, he _forgot_ —

He takes his helmet off and almost chokes at the unfiltered air. The hardwood smell, the smog, the dust. He says the names. Then he says them again. Over and over again, until the sun comes up. He's sorry. He's so sorry he forgot.

There are two ways to loose yourself. The first is to have a goal so big that it does the thinking for you; the second is to have no reason why you're doing what you're doing. He's had a lot of the first kind of lost. He thinks it's fitting that he has a little of the second, now.

There is a tiny shop opposite the tiny provincial spaceport, shoved in between a holonet implant place and a takeaway joint; there is no hand between his shoulderblades pushing him towards it, no sourceless impression of importance, which is why he turns towards it.

They fix shipboard systems there. The 'they' is an elderly twi'lek woman, gone grey all over with age, whose fingers are not so agile, she tells him, as they once were, and two small children, who he is not certain are her grandchildren, but who call her grandmother.

She passes him credits in exchange for re-wiring longhaul communications systems, tuning resonator crystals, building in encryption systems and hop-skipping transmissions through censor nets. She doesn't mind if, when she demands he take a break, he only sits in the back of the shop and reads hyperdrive engine manuals. She doesn't ask him any questions.

He likes to work with his hands when that doesn't involve bruising his knuckles. Everyone who knows him knows that Cody is reliable. Stars are hot, ration bars taste like dust, CC-2224 will finish any job you put in front of him, and he'll finish it on time and he'll do it well. He's just never had to choose the job himself before.

The children do ask questions. It is the highlight of his day, every time, a leaping kind of joy that is better than music or books or quiet or nice dreams or money. He lets them sit on his workbench if they stop fidgeting, answers their questions, teaches the elder child what he's able to understand about the q-protocol. They are nothing at all like cadets.

Sephon, who is seven years old, even though she looks like a two-year-old cadet due for a new growth phase, is gone most of the day attending school and comes back with mud on her trousers from playing games with her friends. She asks him if she can wear his helmet, because she wishes to play knights and monsters with her brother, who will be the monster. He says yes. She's just small enough that she can squish her lekku into the bucket and blink up at him through the visor.

"You would be good at playing monsters," she tells him, very seriously, and then goes to play with her brother, and comes back and sits on his work-bench again and gives him the helmet back with mud on the inside.

He does not chase anyone. He does not go out into the woods, the quiet woods where nobody asks anything of him, and hunt down the quick-moving things, and he does not hunt the people who move through this spaceport with guilt or hate dripping from their minds. He can guess what's expected of him; Dooku will expect him to run to the Republic or, failing that, descend into a frenzy of mindless violence, and so he does neither.

Here is a fact: he can take what he wants. The people here are tired and hungry and ground down to sawdust and they do not have combat training. Most do not even have personal security training. They are not capable of resisting. He is strong, and he is also mostly impervious to blaster-fire and in possession of a plasma chainsaw and a method of coring out all non-essential parts of the mind and leaving it empty and open. Here is a fact: he doesn't. He will not, he will not, he will not.

But he scares people anyway. Even when he doesn't try to.

Hiding is easy. He's always been doing this, just a little, he thinks, but he practices and practices until he can sit beside his workbench while the planetary security forces sweep the street and not even look up from his work, safe in the knowledge that their eyes will slide off him. "Magic," Sephon whispers as she watches, and Cody looks up and winks. There is something very satisfying about being very nearly invisible, about being visible only in his good work, seen in his effort. The feeling disappears quick.

* * *

Commander Cody used to be kind of a dick. He still is. Some _vode_ are just decanted assholes, Waxer guesses. But he used to be more of one.

Waxer was put into his unit in training, before Rex was taken out to go do extra command courses, because they'd realised they hadn't trained enough CCs. Damn, was that scary. Usually you get the CO and the CO's right hand man as some combination of hardass and unbothered, and they balance each other out, but they both came down like a sack of bricks on anyone stepping out of line. Kind of like a pair of droids, talking in binary to each other. He hadn't really registered as a _person_ for a little while, just some terrifying force of nature here to scare the whole unit into line, like some kind of patron god of winning all the sims whether you want to or not.

But he's a trooper too. And he's kind of funny, in a weird sarcastic way where he doesn't want you to know he's joking, and he's like the tooka that Wooley tried to hide in his bunk for two days before he got ratted out—he shows his affection by trying to rip you into little shreds. (Well, that was what Wooley said.)

So he used to be more of a dick than he is now. He's always going to be scary, but he used to come down on everything like it was huge, used to not tolerate any kind of looseness in the regs, used to not tolerate failure. Which Waxer didn't understand, because everyone fucks up sometimes, right? But Cody always wanted you to be perfect. Everyone to be perfect. Like he was scared of what would happen if they weren't.

Which is sometimes good, because he heard about bullying in other units, or people getting injured in safety violations, sometimes really badly, and that never happened under Cody, because if you so much as thought about gently hazing a rookie, Commander Cody would appear from behind you in a haze of smoke and glare at you so hard you died. But sometimes it was bad.

And then Waxer went kind of mental. That's his commanding officer, right? Even if they're still in training. Even if it isn't properly real, yet. They all know it's coming. It's going to be real soon. But one of the rookies had been moving equipment, the kind of easy afternoon job they didn't bother armouring up for properly, and tried to pick something up that was too heavy, Waxer guessed maybe he'd been skipping mandated weights sessions or maybe he'd been injured or something, and he'd dropped it and it had broken and bruised up his foot.

And Cody went spare. He'd worked out how much the broken thing was worth, or maybe he just had that knowledge stored up in his head all the time, and he'd also worked out how much the rookie was worth, in credits, and Waxer was pretty sure he didn't have to look that one up at all. He'd told him what the difference was. Which is not a nice thing to do to a rookie, not at all. Then he'd put the poor guy on laps, though he'd had to hobble a little.

Waxer had found him standing out in the rain, looking like a statue with the water sluicing off his helmet, watching the rookie limp his way through a lap, and he'd been— _really_ angry. The kind of angry that makes you do stupid shit like shout at your commanding officer. But it had gotten worse, because Cody had shouted right back. He doesn't usually do that. He shouts when someone needs shouting at, sure, but not because what you said got to him, just because he's a pissed-off grumpy kind of man with an attitude like a strill. He'd said he was trying to keep the rookie from getting hurt, and he sounded like he meant it. He'd sounded like he was scared.

Waxer had taken his helmet off and gotten right up in his face, like a man with a death wish, and told him he could fuck right off to the hydrothermal vents with that and stay there, because he was hurting the kid right now, himself, before the Kaminoans could get to him.

But hey. He survived that, at least.

Cody let the guy go inside at the end of that lap, even though he'd said it was twenty within the hour or double. He hadn't written Waxer up, even though he probably deserved it. And he'd been—not _nicer._ But less severe. He'd managed to work out the difference between mistakes you can prevent and mistakes you can't, and started reading all sorts of serious books about management and motivation and conflict mediation, because Cody's response to most things is to ask himself how he can make it really, really boring.

The punishment wasn't ameliorated, though, it seems. Just delayed. 'Cause Cody's just given him his duty assignment for the next cycle of training and the bastard has put him in charge of a platoon.

"What?" he says, gaping like a fish. "Why?"

"For training purposes."

"Training what?"

"Training you to lead a platoon, as it says right there, at the top of the flimsi. Do we need to go over the duty roster again?"

"Uh," he says. "No, sir. But I'm not Command-trained."

"You will be," Cody says, and, like an omen of death, pulls down one of his datapads, the kind so loaded down with memory that they dent the floor if you drop them. "Start with this, I think."

"Buh," he says. "Maybe I don't _want_ to be Command-trained—I mean, I'm doing fine, I don't need the stress—"

"That must be so terrible for you," Cody says, dry as a protein ration and about as capable of sympathy.

* * *

Terim doesn't like the new man in the shop.

There's not usually other people in Grandma's shop, but she says they need to get help sometimes when they're busy. Since the war started, she says, they're always busy, but the war also takes away all the people in Null who know how to help her properly, so other people don't stay for long.

He doesn't like the new man because he's there all the time. He's hunched over the work-bench when Terim comes down in the morning to walk to school, and he's replacing datascreens when Terim comes back from mathematics club in the evening. It's weird. It means he knows too much about what they're doing, and he tells Grandma that Terim's been getting out late, recently, because he has to stay up late finishing his homework, and then Grandma says the new man can check if Terim is leaving on time, and he _does,_ just because she asked him to.

Sephon thought he hadn't got a face, for a while, but that's because Sephon's just a little girl, and she doesn't know better. Terim knows he's got a face under the helmet, he just doesn't want people to look at it. He's probably got a name, too, but he won't tell Grandma, and Grandma doesn't mind, because, she says, she can't pay taxes on his wages if he hasn't got a name.

Terim understands about taxes. He's very clever, Grandma says, and he's going to run the shop when she's old and can't pick up boxes any more. So he thinks he ought to know about the man who fixes the transmitters, because it's very almost his shop, and that makes it his business.

So he lets the man tell him about the q-protocol and capacitors.

"You never did this in training?" he asks, elbow-deep in wires; Terim scoffs.

"No, we don't do it in school until the year after next," he explains, because he thinks the man has never gone to school, really, so it makes sense that he doesn't know lots of things, like how to play properly or what kids should know. Grandma says he's a transient, and that's why he hasn't got a proper education, and she says that means he's probably a criminal, so she keeps the credit safe locked. "I'm only twelve, you know."

"Huh," the man says, "Same age as me."

Maybe he can't count.

"No," Terim explains, trying to be very clear, "You're really old. And I'm twelve."

The man laughs. It's a weird noise. It's like he's copying it off someone else. Hearing him laugh without the helmet moving is creepy. His armour is all beat up, scored down the side, and Terim thinks it would be a uniform code violation.

"I tested out of being young," the man says, kind of like he's trying to make a joke. "I did all the exams early and they let me skip right to being grown up."

"No, you didn't, because there aren't exams for growing up." Terim has made this mistake before. "I think you're lying to me. I think you're actually really old under there. Like, twenty five."

Terim learned the word 'geriatric' in Galactic Basic last week, but Grandma said that was a rude word, so he won't say it. Even if it's probably true.

"Nobody's putting one past you, I see, you're too clever," he says, which is right. He can't be fooled. He's gotten too good at telling when Sephon is lying about whether she used his nice pens. "Can you tell me what this bit does, the flashy box?"

Terim doesn't know, but the man explains. He's really good at explaining. He's kind of weird, because he acts like a teacher, but he won't let Terim work late past eleven in the workshop getting his homework done, and he doesn't shout. Or, at least, he doesn't shout at Terim.

Once, some of the older boys who were about to go into the army were being nasty to Sephon, and Terim couldn't do anything because if he told them not to shout at her they'd just kick him, and then the man came out of the front of the shop with his screwdrivers still in his hands and shouted at them for ten minutes without stopping to take a breath, and then went real quiet and put one of the screwdrivers under the biggest boy's chin and put his helmet right up close to his head and said something, something really quiet that went on for a long time, and then it got cold, really cold, without any wind, and then the older kids had left and they hadn't come back.

After that, the man had gone back to working in the back of the shop where nobody can see him, like he did the first couple days after he got the job.

* * *

A section from the last of the few surviving letters from Apprentice A'haren to an unidentified recipient:

> "But I believe—the thought has been growing all my life, like another person who I carry with me—that the whole project was doomed from the start. That that story they tell, of the very first emperor, the thief emperor, is true; we had gods once, and we followed them to their sleeping-place like hunting vornskrs and fell upon them in their sleep, and killed them in a slaughter. My namesake, who was called by the title _Darth,_ which meant, then, _traitor..._ Perhaps it still does
> 
> "These things leave graveyards in the Force. I wonder what terrors the dying oath of a god could bring.
> 
> "When I was still able, when I was not fearful of leaving Layer 79 and did not think of being killed for breathing the clean air, I would go with you, once every month or so, and take the long trip to the surface. I hope that you remember. I do. You were delighted to see the sky, and so was I—but I did not tell you I wished we could only go at night. I do not wish to see our star. Dromund burns too red, too close. She seems to me to be waiting, like an animal for the ambush.
> 
> "What guidance could come from a star like that?
> 
> "Maybe the planet is haunted, all the way down to the core. Maybe we are simply cursed for our crimes. Or maybe I am searching for answers as to why we fail, and fail, and fail. Perhaps the common denominator is me. But I think you would have told me.
> 
> "I must have reached the end of the letter; I hear the drums come, outside. Wishes are useless, we know, and yet I hope that this reaches you. I wish you will not hate me when I am gone.
> 
> "Yours, even now, and at last nothing else,
> 
> "Lian A'Haren."


	2. Chapter 2

The report he'd made had been clear—'No grounds for arrest' and no more, because that was the truth of what happened—but he reasoned that just as the conversations between two troopers in the queue for the caf dispenser have no place in his official correspondence, neither does the Sith's message to Ponds. He is concerned, of course, that it will turn out to be some kind of coded plot and have terrible consequences that could have been prevented by turning all twenty words of it over to a Military Intelligence analyst and allowing Ponds to be interrogated, but it really would have felt too much like gossip.

He thinks Ponds passed it on. To whom, he doesn't know. It's not his business.

In hindsight, it's surprising that it takes several days for Ponds to raise the matter again. He arrives at Mace's office just after the end of the on-shift, standing rigid in front of the desk, his helmet on. Another odd thing—that the Sith had removed his, on Null, though the troopers that Mace works with seem to prefer to keep them on when speaking to him, something like how Mace prefers to wear his hood up among people he doesn't like very much, as something like a shield.

"Sir," he says, "May I ask a question?"

Mace assumes the question is rhetorical. He already has asked a question; if Mace weren't willing to entertain questions, he'd already be in trouble. So he waves him into the office, and waits.

"I looked up the details of what happened on Null," Ponds continues, as though he's making a report. He does not give a reason. "But it was classified—above my paygrade."

"Yes, on orders from High Command. There were concerns about public fear, if there were to be more rumours of Sith." He doesn't agree. Frankly, if it would convince the spending committees to start seriously hearing out the GAR's purchase applications, a little public fear might be a good thing—but that is an uncharitable thing to think, and he is not responsible for these decisions. The Chancellor and the Senate are responsible for the welfare of every citizen of the Republic, and he is certain that they have their constituents and their duty held in their priorities. They have to.

"Right," Ponds says, a little confused; understandable, as the decision is perplexing. "So I wasn't able to see—It's not clear to me why you let him go."

"Ah," Mace says, incoherently. He puts down his stylus and resists the urge to drum his fingertips on the desk surface. He'd have assumed it would be clear to Ponds, clearer than it had been in the moment. "Contrary to common belief," he says, "It is not illegal to be a Sith, and nor should it be."

"No, but," Ponds says, and takes his hands from his sides to clasp them behind him in what Mace is beginning to recognise as a defensive posture. Mace does not rifle through his staff's emotions or make free with their private thoughts, but there is an echo of something strong, a vibration like unease coming through the floors. "He's a trooper, sir. He's not allowed to just leave."

Mace is profoundly distressed by this statement. It takes him several seconds to suppress the counterproductive urge to do something drastic and loud and undignified. He then says something which would not be received kindly by Republic internal military security, were they to catch wind of it, but he cannot quite make himself care about that, which is also, in a very different way, profoundly distressing.

"Commander Ponds," he says, "If a trooper under my command decides that they cannot continue to serve the Republic, I will not pursue them, or prevent them, and I won't order that they be pursued, or facilitate attempts by the Republic to do so. And I'd like that policy to be made clear."

This is insufficient. He can't find anything that _is_ sufficient. "I can't provide more help than that," he says, "But the least that I can do is not..."

Not making it worse, he thinks. Worse than it already is.

"Ah," Ponds says. Surprised, or confused, or something else. Reaches up to perform some kind of gesture, and puts his hand back, gesture incomplete. "I—We appreciate that, sir, but—why couldn't you have said so before?"

Mace has no answer for him.

He shouldn't appreciate it. It's too little, delivered too late, a narrow bridge over a chasm in the earth that grows wider and wider all the time. A chasm that is beginning to look unfixable.

What Ponds knows, but hasn't said, and what Mace knows, too, is that this won't _do_ anything, because they don't try to leave. Early in the fighting, Mace had asked for volunteers for specific tasks, the more dangerous or harrowing kind, and Ponds had had to explain to him that every single trooper would volunteer, and they'd be back where they started. So now he just asks for whoever is most qualified.

But it matters. It matters, and he should have made his mind up a long time ago.

Some part of him has come unmoored, and is floating out in zero-G like a rowboat abandoned on the water. Some part of him is lost, lost from the reliable foundations of duty and justice on which he's built his life, and is spinning, directionless, in the black, asking, _why? why? Why does he carry on like this?_

But that part of him has been lost a long time.

* * *

It takes him two weeks of non-stop work in the systems shop to earn enough to buy the cheapest hyperspace-capable hunk of junk on the planet, and he can only afford _that_ because a customer brought in a mangled navigation panel as junk and he was able to buy it for a tenth of its value, strip it out for parts, and fix the thing himself.

He'd thought that the Separatists were all swimming in top-of-the-line technology, and Serenno hadn't disabused him of that notion, but here on a backwater Sep planet that's not the case. The only new tech on Null is logging engines. It's all funnelled to the front, and to Dooku. Null isn't a member of the Confederacy, it's just Confederacy property.

He names the ship the _Sunrise_. Doesn't write it on the side, or anything, but it doesn't say _Cody_ on the side of his head, so he thinks it still counts. He hopes it likes the name.

The _Sunrise_ is a piece of shit. It makes strange noises while doing absolutely nothing, the insulation is blackened and scored, parts of the engine are held together with electrical tape and the Force, and the air circulation makes everything smell faintly of burned citrus all the time. It's designed for in-system interplanetary hops, the bunk was never intended to see two nights consecutive use, it might be older than he is but he can't prove that because the specifications aren't on the holonet, and the navigation AI is entirely nonexistent. He hates it. It belongs to him.

Waxer used to flout the interplanetary contamination protocols and sneak aboard plants from places they'd set down boots. Usually flowers, showy things, delicate, that died quick without UV light and in the sterile circulated air. Cody hopes he still does. Before he leaves he has a brief moment of madness and packs dirt and water into a discarded hull paint can, hauls his full weight into the boughs of one of the smaller trees—suffers a brief moment of icy terror where he feels like falling and then throws himself down out of spite against the feeling—lands with a seedpod held tight in his hand.

He puts it under the lights in the universe's smallest shipboard kitchen. The can barely fits, but it's under the lighting strip. Maybe that's how trees work. He doesn't know, he's never had a plant before.

A bunk, a living thing, a quiet place to say the names. He thinks he might write them down on something better than the datastick still tucked close to his chest, somewhere that feels permanent—but nothing is, he's learned. Better to keep them close to him. Inside of him.

The blade, in his hand. It comes to the hand without being called. It settles between the new calluses and makes itself comfortable. He'll look up from the navigation screen to find his thumb resting on the activation plate, the muscles settled into place where they feel they ought to be.

Something they don't tell you on Kamino: the metal of a lightsaber is always cold. The power cell is so efficient it almost doesn't need the help, could run burning for months at a time, but kyber is a sink for energy, and it draws it from environmental air, from the motion of the sleeting neutrino radiation that runs through the universe and passes through everything except the kyber, from the warmth of your hand if it has to. There is an exception to everything. The hyperdrive is an exception to distance. Kyber is an exception to thermodynamics. The Force is an exception to conservation of energy. A person is an exception to causality.

He thinks: if you laid a person out on a bed of kyber, pure refined crystal, and left them there to sleep, how long would it take for it to kill them?

* * *

Now, Cody's not a good pilot by any measure. He's a _safe_ pilot—he does his checks and then he does them again, he can give line and verse of interstellar travel regulations in half of the Republic, but he's not a _good_ pilot. It takes more of his concentration than it ought to keep a well-maintained Republic military standard speeder going in a straight line, and he just isn't used to doing his thinking with an engine.

It's like shooting. Sure, he can hit a target, and do it damn well, but some troopers can treat a deecee like a third arm, and he always prefers to address the problem with his own body, rather than a blaster's crossfocus beam. The ship is a tool, and while the body is a tool, too, it's one he understands better. Like the difference between the lightsaber when it was stolen and the lightsaber once it was _his._ And this ship in particular is the equivalent of that one soldering iron that was more liable to melt the plastoid of the gauntlets and then set your hair on fire than to melt the solder.

Still, maybe the lack of navigational AI is a good thing, since it forces him to learn quick.

What a luxury it is to get lost. To float out in the void, unmoored and directionless, watching the stranger stars through the viewscreens, trying to parse astrosurvey data and work out which sun you're orbiting. No hailing code on the comm that anyone will recognise. No-one to ask you where you are. To turn off the lights and the engine and just wait in the dark, wait, wait, watch how the morning breaks...

How terrible it is to be lost. _Kemrayc,_ he thinks. Star to star and nobody speaking your name.

* * *

The Kupa Belt is smack-bang in the middle of no-man's-land, the political equivalent of the space between the first line of trenches and the chasm out of which the droidekas are climbing. The star system it orbits is out on the edge of the Unknown Regions and also far from the Core, so far that real-time holocalls just aren't possible because of the response lag and the lack of nearby interstellar repeaters. There's government on the planets nearer to the sun, and it's not an uncontacted mess like some places, but it's so cut off that they simply can't afford to have a stake in the conflict tearing the Galaxy into pieces. There's no profit to be made in meddling with them.

And, he thinks as he nudges the Sunrise through the clouds of debris like a man trying to perform laser surgery with a chisel, whatever's going down down on the inhabited planets, it doesn't extend to the asteroid belt. If there were a functional government out here, there would actually be regulations regarding the dumping of slag out into the vacuum. They might not be _enforced,_ but whoever's running the operation out here has never even tried to give a wink and a nudge to debris management.

Eventually he gets sick of nudging and just glares through the viewport until the clouds and coils of mercury cower and give in, parting before the nose of the ship, cutting him a path. Sometimes, to move forward, you have to make a space for you in the future, and sometimes to do that you have to _push._

The Kupa Belt is a special piece of hell, sure, but it's where the last records placed the survivors of the Damariin Clan, so Cody's hauled himself all the way there from Null on the far side of the Mid-Rim in a ship so cramped he can't even light his blade without slicing through a vital ventilation pipe.

He's going to have to take the armour off. The prospect is daunting. Some part of him revolts at the prospect, whispers to him, insists, _this is like the sabre, you can just take it, just take it and leave—it's yours now, it belongs to you, you never have to give it back, just because you want it—_ but that part of him is lying. More difficult to ignore is the part in the back of his brain that chants like a meditation mantra that he _needs_ it. He needs it to be safe. He needs it, needs a barrier between him and the world, needs it because it hurts when he's without it, and isn't that the most fundamental reason there is?

Isn't that more important?

* * *

Natare thinks she's going to be robbed when the man first comes through the door and stands, feet planted like a fighting man, in front of her workbench with a mid-range rifle at his belt and a leather bundle on his back.

He's dressed strangely, and that's coming from a woman in head-to-toe red paint and metal. He's dressed like someone who has heard of clothes before, but has never encountered them in real life; he's deduced that the purpose is to cover skin, and therefore has draped himself entirely in fabric. His hands are gloved, his boots clank, and she can only see a thin sliver of his face through the wrap and coil of fabric meant for other purposes. There's dust and smoke-black everywhere, the way that strangers to the Belt get before they learn to avoid the places where the artificial atmosphere in the station blows dust and powdered who-knows-what from out of the ventilation shafts.

"Silas Damariin," he says, in strangely-accented Mando'a. There's a curious sort of hiss to his voice, and it might be part of the accent or it might be part of why his mouth is covered over. "You were his kin?"

She puts down her blowtorch; he shuffles slightly.

"I was," she says, because—

It's been so long since Galidraan. A decade at least. She knows he's gone; her sisters are already using the past tense, but she hasn't been able to yet. Not without a body.

"I could not build him a pyre," the stranger says; "But I have brought you what I could."

She is terrified, for a moment, that he will lay down his bundle and Silas will be curled up in the leather, still and stiff. He almost is. The stranger gets swarf in the creases of his gloves as he spreads out the material on the clearest of the benches; he'll need new ones. He sets the helmet first, and then every other piece, meticulous and precise and practiced, the way the set would be stowed for sleeping during peacetime. The cuisse has been damaged, maybe torn through, and clumsily repaired; she can't tell if it was before or—after.

The red has been painted over with the kind of paint that speeder manufacturers use for hulls, with tiny specks of reflective material so that it'll shine even if it's mistreated and scuffed. Black, for justice, but that's not why.

Her breath coils in her throat. He's dead, he's dead, he's dead.

She'd known for months, but it wasn't properly real. It was like a bad dream.

The relief is thick and choking.

* * *

The Force doesn't want him here. Not because there's something wrong with the Kupa Belt—although there _is,_ a place shouldn't be hungry but this place is—but because it wants him somewhere else.

He never used to be able to pick up on this, the tugging feeling. At least, he wasn't aware of it consciously, which meant mostly that he wasn't able to resist. Now he can identify it and ignore it.

_There is the will of the Force and there is the will of the wielder,_ or so goes one of the monographs, another piece of moral philosophy he wasn't able to take with him. He remembers most of it, he thinks, but he isn't sure. _Why should it be afforded importance greater than yours? The Force is not concerned with what you want, and you are. Do not take on the Force as another master, but remember always that it is a tool, and it is in your hands._

So he's come here, because the Force doesn't care about the memory of Silas Damariin, but Cody does.

No atmosphere, in asteroid belts, so the settlements here are sealed, huge triple-layered windows opening out onto the black of space, turned foggy with remnants and waste from mining. He'd been flying down to the landing port and seen the people, hundreds of them, walking out from the single-building city head-to-toe in shining metal, but when he'd landed he'd seen the racks of air canisters on the inside of the magcon shield; they're not Mandalorians, they're miners in pressurised exoskeletons.

Which is odd, because half of this base is built according to Mandalorian architecture. But it's only a few of them, tucked away in this corner, with a mechanic's shop repairing the exosuits and the crawlers they use to drag ore from the pits to the processing rigs. There's a line he'd crossed, a series of the airlocks they use to separate corridors, except that these ones had been actual working airlocks instead of busted-up wedged-open health-and-safety violations, and he'd gone from grey-walled industrial architecture to this, the peaked-arch clean lines and glossed golden metal and repeating patterns.

Decoration. There's no decoration in the rest of the base, because decoration is expensive.

He's never been to the Mandalore system, but he's read about it. When he was younger, when he thought maybe he was coming out of the other end of the war alive.

Well. Look at that. He has. He's gone out of the war sideways, ran away instead of sticking it out, deserted—but he's alive.

He's had jana'caf once, back on Kamino. A prize from a trainer, after beating out fifty other cadets on Gauntlet Four. Just half a cup. They'd known that the clones would do pretty much anything for some kind of novelty, they'd used it as a lure; go on this training exercise, it's muddy and the rain's made of acid and you'll be shot at all the time and there's wild animals trying to eat you, but there'll be walls there that aren't UV-white, and you'll be able to eat things they don't serve in the mess. And it's profitable for us.

Everything on Kamino was the same. She'd promised something they'd never tasted to the winner, something spicy, and it had smelled good. Everything on Kamino smelled of saltwater, engine grease, or clone, including the food. It had been a bloodbath.

The sense-memory is vivid. He'd hated it, the first sip, and then he'd gone back for another—bitter, complicated, enough capsacin to burn and no oil to absorb it so it slicks down the back of the throat. A little bit of citrus. Bright.

Damariin—he doesn't know her first name, and if he were her he wouldn't hand it out—hadn't shot him, like he'd been faintly expecting. Or taken it and closed the airlock in his face. She'd sobbed into his shirt for ten minutes, and then waved him inside, pushed him into a seat, given him a full mug of the thing he'd once scaled a fifteen-metre climbing wall in seven and a half seconds to taste.

It still smells good. To drink it, he'll have to take off the fabric over his face.

He reaches for the old reserves of _fuck it._ They're well developed. Damariin seems a hardy type, she can handle a few extra teeth where teeth shouldn't be, and this place is so obscure that it'll take at least two days for reports of a clone to make their way back to either side, if they've ever even seen one for long enough to recognise him now.

He can cut his way out of here if he has to. He doesn't want to. But it smells good.

He tugs the wrap off, gets it caught on one ear and wrestles with it, and then hunches over his cup protectively as though it's a contraband chocolate bar and Fox is about to challenge him for it. Then he realises what he's doing, outright _refuses_ to be self-conscious, and sets his expression firm.

This is his _face._ So maybe he's been feeling flayed since he took the helmet off. So maybe he'd walked out of the Sunrise with half a fucking pillowcase wrapped around his head so he doesn't get reported as a runaway and felt like he was under inspection again, called up in front of the geneticist and the anatomist and the psychologist to assert that he's a functioning product, he's just as good as everyone else, he's just like everyone else, he _promises._

This is _his_ face, and he's pretty sure it's not changing any time soon. So he's decided to take all of the soft-vulnerable-meat feelings and turn them directly into anger. He's had a lot of practice at it. The scar across the side of his face is part of him now, and he likes the way it makes him look, likes the stories the rookies used to tell about it—but he hadn't always.

It tastes good. Different to how he remembers, but that's probably just because the recipe is different, and because things taste different than they used to. With the way his mouth is shaped, now, he has to be careful, drink slowly, reel things in with his tongue, because the jaw-plates of his mouth go all the way up to his cheeks and down to where the jaw meets the neck; there's no margin for error. It's bright as he remembers. A little acid. Strong and bitter, but smooth, spices almost covering the faint metallic taste of re-filtered water out in space where they mine the ice from asteroids, the burn of capsaicin pleasant, shaking him awake.

Damariin is making a very specific expression. He's not sure what it specifically _is_ , but he doubts it ever gets much airtime, because most people don't usually turn out to have a face that is entirely human except for how the lower half of it opens like a nightmare puzzle box to reveal that it's just teeth all the way down.

But that's not it, because she blinks at him and says, "Fett?"

He blinks right back at her. That's a new one. Usually people are aware that on the balance of probability, the odds that the Fett-shaped person you're looking at is actually Jango Fett are so close to zero that most computers would just set it direct to nil. He takes another sip, lets it wash across his tongue. Waits for her to cotton on.

* * *

There is a dark patch on his mantle that she hopes is a stain and not the marks of her tears. She can tell he wouldn't say anything either way; he's been kind. A good boy. He's trying, and Natare has always been able to tell that.

Jango Fett's face. Silas' good-for-nothing scoundrel of a friend whose ideas got him killed. Two-bit bloodthirsty bounty hunter with a vendetta and a thing for trouble. Her baby brother's best friend. Jango Fett's face, broken open with eyes that are black right now but which seem to turn an acid yellow in her peripheral vision.

"I am Natare Damariin," she says. "Call me Tare."

She doesn't say 'thank you.' He probably wouldn't accept it. He blinks at her for several moments, his eyes darting across the room; holding his head still on purpose, instead of swivelling to make up for a lack of peripheral vision, the way you learn to in a helmet.

"Cody," he says, hesitant, which is a very... _Coruscanti_ name for a Mandalorian. But Fett sold his soul, or at least his genes—there had been the massacre, and then silence, and then stories from the Core. Another piece of trouble, she'd thought. Not worth getting wrapped up in, because people who get drawn into Fett's business die.

She'd told Silas that. He hadn't listened. People never listen.

She hadn't made the connection, that they'd _look_ like him. No Republic soldiers out here, not unless the Republic decides they need lithium and mercury. Which they might, soon.

Then what's wrong with him? What happened? Nobody had said that the Republic had taken plastoid-wrapped copies of Fett and then gotten _experimental._ It's not her business, she reminds herself. She owes him a debt, that's all, for his kindness in bringing her brother's soul home. So she'll not say anything to anyone. If the young man's on the run, if he's slipped the leash or the noose, she'll help him however she can.

But the yellow eyes flicker, like he's thinking seriously, more seriously than she would usually expect an introduction to require, and then he says, "I used to be called Kote, when I was young."

No surname, no title, no clan name, no house. And his Mando'a is idiosyncratic, even putting aside the quirks of his phonetics; limited and technical in vocabulary and at once very dialect, or, at least, she assumes that the particulars of his grammar are dialect features, though it doesn't sound like any other group she's found before.

"Someone had high expectations," she says, and he laughs, dry enough that she can tell she's right, rough-sounding. "Well. Hello, Cody."

Human-sounding laugh. Well.

"Where is your armour?" she asks, because some things aren't her business, and some absolutely are. He's got helmet hair. He's got helmet hair to a frankly hilarious extent, and she would be amused by it if she didn't feel like the whole of her insides were dead, if she weren't focusing on the mystery to stop herself from dissolving back into a puddle of tears.

He starts, the electrician's insulating gauntlets tapping against the cup. There's something strange about his hands, something that breaks the usual pattern for bipedal sentient species with hands, which is most of them, for reasons she doesn't understand. The joints bend in directions they shouldn't. He could, she thinks, do some really scary things with a blade. "Uh," he says, and makes an odd rumbling noise. "It—it melted, mostly. And the rest was taken. I was... I was given his, for my work."

Oh. He _wore_ it. Her stomach turns over like a malfunctioning speeder engine, visceral horror crawling up the inside of her throat.

There are stories, of course, of people wearing the armour of the dead, armour they haven't inherited as clan-right or promise-metal, but there's stories about people doing all sorts of horrible things to each other. In the stories, they usually wind up horribly cursed for the crime. The thought is... Like peeling off someone's skin and wearing it as a cape, still wet and warm.

"I see." He'd brought it back.

Mandalorians like her have the luxury of a mostly spiritual relationship with the _beskar'gam._ She would never wear a set with a strange providence, but then, she's only occasionally shot at. If she wore it the way he obviously did, as protection first and identity second, she might. Then he clears his throat with a rumble and says, "I'm not actually a Mandalorian. I think I should make that clear."

"Interesting," she says, which is a placeholder for an incredulous obscenity, and puts down the teacup. "Where did you learn Mando'a, then?"

"I," he starts. "When I was young. I was taught by the people who raised me. We all were."

"And what else did they teach you?"

He squints at her. "What do you teach a child? Tactics, mostly. We got hand-to-hand, shooting, piloting, logistics, opsec, the usual curriculum. I did communications specialisation, so I can fix a comms unit. Why do you ask?"

"Resol'nare?"

"Yes," he says, looking crumpled-up. "Yes, we learned that."

She hums, pats his hand, broad and long-boned. He's making no discernible expression, but still looks fairly pole-axed. Learned. Not _yes, we keep them._

Then the idea of it catches up to her. Not just Fett causing trouble. Not just Fett and bloodlust. Children by the thousands, all right, maybe Natare, back when she'd had a functional marriage and a mechanic's shop that did enough business to be bothered by the tax people, had adopted one or two more foundlings than she could manage. But this one's not got a clan name. Says he's not a Mandalorian.

These days, they're modern. Nobody seriously believes that people who aren't Mandalorian don't have their own place in the Aftersoul, or at least nobody Natare would want to have a drink with. But Natare still remembers what her grandfather had said when her great-uncle had died, after he'd walked away. The way he'd kneeled in the dirt with his helmet in his hands, crying, saying, over and over again, _when will I find him again? When will I find him?_

_I'm not actually a Mandalorian,_ he'd said. And he'd brought her brother home. Did he ever get a choice to be?

"Listen, kid," she says, and he makes the face that grown adults make when you call them 'kid;' her eldest son looks just the same, and she will not let the fact that he has his own son now stop her. "Why don't you stick around a little? Stay for dinner. Crash here a few days, if you're going to be on the station."

"I've got somewhere to go," he says, as though he's just realised that, "But—I suppose I can stay for dinner."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> average clone adopted by 8 old ladies per day factoid actually statistical error. average clone is actually adopted by 0.3 old ladies per day. cody 'nice young man' kote, who is vibing in the esstran sector and is adopted by 30 old ladies per hour, is an outlier adn should not be counted


End file.
